Death of a Manatee County informant

Friday

Family and friends of Christopher Boston say, given his long history of addiction, he should never have been used as a confidential informant by the Manatee County Sheriff's Office.

BRADENTON — Christopher Boston was a drug addict. He looked gaunt, sometimes had sores on his face and his mother was always finding gold Brillo pads lying around the house. She came to realize they were screens for his crack pipe, and all of that time spent pacing outside on his cellphone? He was not playing Yahtzee, as he often told her, that’s for sure.

Boston, 33, had grown so desperate that he became a paid confidential informant, helping a local detective he nicknamed “Archer” bring down drug dealers. Pawn or participant, it hardly mattered to him. He used his earnings to purchase drugs for himself, and if risking his life meant one more arrest, one more payoff and one more fix, he was willing to play the game.

But before drugs he was someone else entirely, as all addicts are: a boisterous kid who excelled as a Cub Scout and loved having soap bubble fights with his sister after the dishes were done, then climbing onto the roof with her to look at the stars and wonder if space aliens really existed.

On drives to their grandmother’s house in New Port Richey they’d sing “Paradise by the Dashboard Lights” in the back of the family station wagon, and “Sara” by Starship, and he swore he would name his first daughter after the song.

When he told his grandmother he loved her she’d always respond “I love you more.” Eventually she gave him a pillow with that phrase on it, and just the other day his mother hugged the pillow, inhaled, and cried all over again because she loved him, too, and now all that was left was his smell on the pillow.

Maybe the knock on the door shouldn’t have been a surprise after all. The maiden name of Karen Boston, Chris’ mother, is Coffin. There was once a murder in her home before she lived there, and there was another next door. Her first daughter, Amanda, was born with the umbilical cord wrapped three times around her neck, and her first husband, Jeff, was found by a maid lying on a motel room floor in Kentucky, dead of a heroin overdose, untouched pizzas scattered about. That was three years ago.

And now Chris was dead, too?

On Aug. 9, around 1:30 a.m., she opened the door at her home on the cul-de-sac in east Bradenton to find two Manatee County Sheriff’s Office detectives standing there.

“Are you Christopher Boston’s mother?”

“Yes.”

“There’s been an incident tonight.”

“Oh my god, it’s a drug overdose isn’t it?"

“No ma’am, he was shot.”

Her son — shot and killed and dumped by the side of the road. She wakes up at night now, after talking to Chris in her sleep, but darned if she can remember anything she has said to him. Then she gets up and wanders around the house, usually a dozen times a night, because things have not gotten better since the knock on her door.

And sometimes, in her darkest moments, she’ll allow her mind to go there, to her version of the murder, the night when her son was shot in the back of the head by a drug dealer he may have met while working as an informant for the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office.

“I just shudder,” she says of the murder images in her mind. “My picture is not a good picture.”

Policy

Chris Boston nicknamed the detective “Archer” after the secret agent on the animated cable television show. The name “Archer” was even programed into his cellphone. His real name is Greg Dunlap, a special investigations detective who has been with the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office for 20 years, according to multiple members of Boston’s family and his friends.

The accounts of Boston’s involvement with Dunlap were based on interviews with these family members and friends, in addition to phone records.

In a letter to the newspaper, Wells stated he “cannot confirm whether or not Mr. Boston was a confidential informant.”

“There are details relating to the investigation into Mr. Boston’s death that will not be shared at this time, as the homicide investigation is active and ongoing,” Wells wrote. “However, I would caution you that ‘those close to Boston’ are suspected of being involved.”

Because Wells declined to be interviewed, the Herald-Tribune was not able to ascertain what the sheriff meant by his comments about “those close to Boston.”

Boston had value to Dunlap, especially considering Manatee County has been dealing with one of the worst opioid problems in Florida. Boston could tip off his handler to certain dealers and use MSO-issued money to make buys and set up dealers to be arrested. In return, Boston was paid a certain amount of money. This, however, was a risky proposition as Boston had a drug problem, could use his earnings to procure heroin, and was exposed to dealers on a regular basis.

In essence, Boston was the problem the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office was trying to prevent.

“He was completely taken advantage of,” said Lois Bischoff, a friend of Boston’s since ninth grade. “He was just a tool. It doesn’t seem they cared he was brutally murdered. I don’t think he’d be dead today if he wasn’t a CI, I really don’t.

“Why can’t the police use their own people?”

Per state statute and internal policy, Boston’s addiction should have been a strong factor in considering him for informant work, and if the MSO was unaware of his problem, police reports from 2015 show Boston was passed out in his car at a gas station after shooting up with heroin not long after his father died of a heroin overdose himself. In a letter to the judge in the case he stated he had a problem as well. He had also been in a drug treatment facility as recently as June.

In a deposition conducted by Bradenton attorney Peter Lombardo for an unrelated case, Dunlap was asked if he would ever use a CI who was actively using drugs.

“Not me personally,” he said. “No.”

Also, as per state statute and internal policy, every aspect of each transaction involving informants is supposed to be recorded, but when asked in the same deposition how much CIs get paid Dunlap responded: “I couldn’t tell you even if I wanted to. It’s nothing we keep.”

Through a public records request, the Herald-Tribune sought copies of all MSO documents — including narcotics reports — regarding Boston and his interactions with Detective Dunlap.

The Sheriff’s Office refused this request, stating, “To the extent that there is or is not a record(s), such record(s) would be considered active criminal investigative information and/or active criminal intelligence.”

Confidential informants are not to be overextended — the job is just too dangerous — but those close to Boston claim he was overused and taken advantage of: A heroin addict is never going to turn down a chance to make money for his next fix.

“They are feeding (drug-addicted informants) money to keep them on the streets and there is something very twisted about that,” Tallahassee attorney Lance Block said, who represented the family of another CI who was killed.

At first, Karen Boston said, Dunlap would pick her son up in a discreet place so no one could discover the connection and another detective would pat him down as a precaution. It was crucial the two not be seen together as word on the street — and in prisons — would travel fast that Boston was a CI.

In the deposition, Dunlap was asked if he ever picked up confidential informants at their homes.

“No,” Dunlap answered. “If the whole point is to be anonymous, to help yourself out and help out the community, it just wouldn’t make sense to go to the house.”

The Herald-Tribune, however, obtained a photo of Dunlap’s MSO vehicle parked in front of Boston’s home. A neighbor, Kevin Pitts, said he saw the vehicle there and Karen Boston — with whom Chris lived — said Dunlap was there at least 10 times since last October, when he began working with her son.

“It was so many times Chris wouldn’t even say he was leaving the house,” she said. “He’d say, ‘You know when Archer comes I gotta go.’”

Dunlap also was asked in the deposition if any of the CIs he was handling had been harmed in 2018.

“I do not know that answer,” he stated.

On Aug. 7, at 5:47 p.m., Karen Boston sent Dunlap a text message: “Hey there Greg. This is Karen Chris mother. I think we need to have a talk please”

At 6:46 p.m. Dunlap responded: “Is everything ok?”

Dunlap called her 10 minutes later — “I was begging him to get Chris out” of being a CI, Karen Boston said of the conversation. “I said, ‘This is a mother pleading to you.’”

She said Dunlap owed her son at least $500 for the informant work and she asked him when he would pay the money.

“He said, ‘For one thing you don’t give a lot of money to a druggie,’” Karen Boston said. “Then he said, ‘I’ll get back to you tomorrow.’”

At 3:14 a.m. Aug. 9, she sent Dunlap another text: “Christopher got shot and now he is DEAD.”

Her cellphone indicates Dunlap read the message the next morning.

She never heard from him again.

Rachel’s law

Rachel Hoffman was a free-spirited, 23-year-old Grateful Dead fan who had just graduated from Florida State when she was arrested for marijuana possession. She was told by the Tallahassee Police Department that she faced four years in prison.

Or, they said, she could become a confidential informant and have it all go away.

On May 7, 2008, she hopped in her silver Volvo and drove to a park with $13,000 and a wire in her purse. She was sent there to buy 1,500 Ecstasy pills, an ounce-and-a-half of cocaine and a gun. It should have been routine: A total of 20 police officers tailed her and a surveillance plane flew overhead to make sure it was.

And then it wasn’t: The dealers wanted to move the meeting, and as Hoffman followed them her wire shorted out and the officers lost contact. Once the dealers found the wire in her purse they shot her five times with the gun she was supposed to buy. Her body was found 50 miles away.

She was laid to rest in Safety Harbor, near the home of her father, Irv Hoffman, who was so distraught he sat at her grave each morning and night for three straight years.

“This is something you don’t get through,” he said. “It’s something that’s always there. It’s heartbreaking and I wouldn’t wish it on any parent.”

Hoffman thinks the Tallahassee police officers who were supposed to be protecting his daughter are “cowards” for exposing an untrained civilian “who couldn’t find her socks in the morning” to one of the most dangerous drug busts in the city’s history.

And every year, on Rachel’s birthday, Hoffman said he calls detective Ryan Pender of the Tallahassee Police Department, who was in charge of her, and leaves a message on his voicemail that has never been returned.

“I call him to tell him what a piece of crap he is,” Hoffman said.

‘Cowboy system’

Lance Block, the Tallahassee attorney, represented Irv Hoffman and Margie Weiss — Rachel’s biological mother — in a wrongful death lawsuit filed against the Tallahassee Police Department. They were awarded $2.8 million. More importantly, they helped create “Rachel’s Law,” which was the first comprehensive legislation of its kind in the country.

Implemented in 2009, it took important new steps toward holding agencies more accountable by requiring them to provide guidelines for the safety of informants and also by requiring them to refer certain informants to substance abuse treatment programs.

But some feel that the statute did not go far enough. Block said he would like to see oversight expanded to include more specific data turned over to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, such as number of informants being used, their names and race. Block said there is no accurate way to know how many have been harmed or killed.

“It’s so unregulated,” Block said. “It really is a cowboy system. It’s in the shadows and someone needs to police the police if we are going to continue to allow law enforcement to use untrained citizens to do the most dangerous type of police work there is.

“It’s a very sick system. We don’t use civilians to do detective work for murders or rapes, or even to give out parking tickets at high school football games, but we use them for drug wars?”

Irv Hoffman said he wanted Rachel’s Law to ensure that no one with a drug problem such as Boston could be used for CI work but was unsuccessful in securing the stipulation. The law enforcement community, he said, would not allow it.

“It’s a very I-don’t-care-about-you kind of attitude,” he said. “‘You’re a drug user. You are no one important.’ The police forget these people have families. I think the police see them as just throwaways, people who are expendable.

“They didn’t send him (Boston) to rehab. They sent him out to get more drugs. They didn’t say, ‘Hey, you have a problem. You need help.’ No, they sent him out to do their job for them.”

Margie Weiss, Rachel Hoffman’s mother, started a foundation called the “Rachel Morningstar Foundation” which is dedicated to educating the public on the use of CIs and the risks involved in their work.

“Law enforcement calls it a necessary evil,” Weiss said. “Well, there was nothing evil about my daughter. They are absolutely giving them a death sentence and they use these people over and over and over again.

“This is the most dangerous form of police work and why do you think they use these people? It’s because they don’t want to die themselves.”

Rock bottom

It’s almost to the point where Lois Bischoff, Boston’s childhood friend, won’t answer the phone anymore. Who is it this time, she wonders? The drug problem in Manatee County has become so extreme that in recent years she said around two dozen people she knew have died from overdoses.

“I feel like the only way it will end is when everyone has passed away,” she said.

Boston’s death hit her harder than the others because it was a murder and not an OD. Still, his drug addiction always loomed, even as he periodically was able to get clean.

“Chris said he didn’t want to do this,” Karen Boston said. “He said the pain was unbearable. I said, ‘When you get that feeling come to me and we’ll go to the mall or go for a walk.’

“He said, ‘It’s not that simple.’”

Bischoff said she can’t imagine what Boston went through. There was the pressure of getting his next fix, the pull of wanting to get clean, the desire to see his 3-year-old daughter Reagan, who lives in another state, and the fear that someone on the street would find out what he was doing with the MSO and kill him.

“The people who get arrested find out who turned them in. It’s not hard. For him to turn in that many people the police had to know something bad was going to happen to him and they just didn’t care.”

Bischoff said rock bottom is when an addict becomes an informant simply for the money to buy drugs. And unlike Hoffman, Boston wasn’t working off a charge either. He was working for money.

"I don’t think too many people become a CI because they want to stop the drug epidemic,” she said.

Lindsie Tobias, Boston’s sister who lives in Washington state, said being a CI meant more to her brother than just the means for drugs, however. He liked the feeling of being counted on, she said. It boosted his self-esteem. Suddenly he mattered.

“He wanted some validation that he could do more than he what was doing,” she said. “He was looking for acceptance.”

Michael Frazier is another of Boston’s longtime friends who met him at Manatee High. He says he helped Boston get into Centerstone, a rehab facility, in June. Two weeks prior to rehab, when they were working on Frazier’s house, he said Boston indicated for the first time he was being used as a confidential informant but “I didn’t want to hear it because I don’t believe in snitching.”

Still, Frazier said Boston confided in him about an encounter he had with a dealer, though it is not clear if the introduction was made through his work with the MSO. Boston told Frazier he had purchased some bad drugs from a man and he didn’t pay him as a result.

The man, according to Frazier, began calling Boston and threatening to kill him and his mother.

“Most guys these days don’t beat you up,” Frazier said. “They pull out a gun and shoot you. Chris was scared for his life.”

Boston, according to Frazier, said that he gave the dealer’s name to an MSO detective.

“Chris said, ‘I have no other options. I’m afraid, especially for my mother.’

“I said, ‘Damn, bro.’”

The name of the man Boston turned in?

He went by “Fresh.”

Domestic violence

When a female guest of Chris Boston’s walked out of the bathroom on the morning of Aug. 5, Boston was high and his mother was upset. There was an argument and Karen’s fingernails scratched Chris across the face, drawing blood. He called 911, then appeared to have second thoughts and hung up. The sheriff’s deputies, as required, arrived at the house anyway.

It wasn’t long before Karen Boston was standing outside in handcuffs when Chris came running out of the front door.

He approached Karen and she shot him an incredulous look she now regrets, a look that said “you’ve got to be kidding me.”

Chris turned around and walked back inside.

There was no hug.

Their first moment together was in 1984. That’s when he was born in a closet at Tampa General Hospital because the doctors couldn’t get Karen into a regular room fast enough to deliver him.

This was their last.

‘3 for 20’

In early August, Chris Boston was planning to return to rehab again, according to his family. He wanted to get clean. But first he needed to score some Subutex, the drug that makes withdrawal easier to bear.

Boston contacted the dealer who went by “Fresh.”

On Aug. 4, “Fresh” texted Boston and said he would give him “3 for 20.”

The next day “Fresh” texted Boston with “U playing F------ games” and “I want my money,” according to a text message Boston’s mother still has.

The phone “Fresh” used for the texts, according to a report, belonged to Dyaisha Jordan, who indicated on her Facebook page that her boyfriend’s name was Manrieke Miller, who went by “Fresh.”

On Aug. 24, Miller was observed by detectives driving his girlfriend’s white Chevy Malibu around Manatee County to various locations. Eventually the vehicle stopped at a building in east Bradenton and multiple MSO vehicles surrounded the car with their sirens activated. Miller had been driving with a revoked license.

Miller re-emerged from the building, entered his car, hit the accelerator and pushed an MSO vehicle into a deputy. Miller then tried to run on foot before being apprehended.

A search of Miller’s vehicle revealed $1,100 in cash, 50 grams of marijuana, more than 15 grams of cocaine and two Oxycodone pills, everything packaged to sell, according to a report. Miller had just been released from prison on March 20 after serving 16 months for selling cocaine.

Also found inside the car: Blood in the front and rear seats and on the console. A bullet hole in the interior of the passenger door.

Miller was arrested for battery on a law enforcement officer, among other charges, and while in jail he phoned his girlfriend and tried to concoct a story. He asked her if she remembered a “white guy” getting into the car “all sweaty with red stuff running down his face.”

“This story would not be plausible as Boston could not have entered the car after being shot through the head,” wrote Detective Daniel Dickerman in the probable cause affidavit.

A DNA test concluded the blood from the console belonged to Boston with a 1 in 4.0 octillion error rate. The blood on the bullet extracted from the door was confirmed to be Boston’s with a 1 in 6.2 nonillion chance of error.

After Boston was shot, his body was taken to Rubonia, a small town on the outskirts of Manatee County, and dumped on a road near Miller’s house, a surveillance camera picking up the car. It was the same car that Miller and Boston had worked on several times over the summer at Boston’s house, with Karen Boston at one time even coming out and offering them something to drink — “I thought they were friends,” she said.

A passerby discovered Boston’s body around 10 p.m. on Aug. 8 after seeing his feet sticking out of the grass.

Miller has since pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder.

Essentially, Boston was killed over $20.

“Yes, he was a drug addict,” Bischoff said. “But he didn’t deserve to die like that.

“To end someone’s life over $20, that to me is an evil person.”

Throwaway

Karen Boston said she has not heard anything from Dunlap since her son’s death.

“To me that shows how coldhearted and unsympathetic he is,” Bischoff said. “How do you not send condolences? To him Chris was not a human being. To him Chris was just a stepping-stone in his career. Chris’ life didn’t matter.

“He could have stopped by the house and made Chris’ mom feel like Chris was more than a CI, that he was human being. He was murdered. C’mon, you can’t say ‘I’m sorry for your loss?’ That’s how many words? It’s not that hard.”

When asked if she believes the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office — and Dunlap in particular — is responsible for her son’s death for allowing an addict to interact with dealers, Karen Boston said: “I feel he had something to do with it.”

Tobias, who used to go to her brother’s room for comfort at night when her parents fought, said her “first best friend” shares in some of the blame, too.

“My mom wants to blame them but I said, ‘Mom, that’s not fair,’” Tobias said. “At the end of the day Chris made these choices. These are all his choices.

“I’d like to think the best of him but realistically addicts are addicts until they choose otherwise.”

Yes, he was an addict.

True, he was an informant.

Tragically, he was killed.

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